Graduation week

Despite warnings from guidebooks (repeated by Thanh the day of my arrival) not to eat at the little sidewalk kitchens strewn up and down every block in Ha Noi, I folded to peer pressure in the second week and joined my classmates a couple times in scarfing down some of this "good, cheap food". They assured me they had all been indulging since their arrival with nary an ill effect and laughed at me for paying $2-$3 per meal at my "expensive" cafés when I could be eating just as well on the street for 75 cents.

Perhaps I'm genetically inferior, or maybe my gut is just worn out from decades of a diet skewed toward pizza, coffee, alcohol, and sugar. Whatever the etiology, I was soon suffering from the last ailment a teacher wants to carry into a classroom—diarrhea. Staying home sick from school was not a CELTA option, so I did the necessary thing—I stopped eating outside a 6 pm to midnight window. Between diarrhea, stress, sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and "heat frustration", it's no wonder I came a little unravelled toward the end and something of a miracle I managed to graduate with my younger, hardier classmates. In fact, I did excuse myself early on the last day, overcome by nausea due to dehydration, and missed a celebratory shindig at Imran's house.

I reconstituted myself enough by Saturday morning, though, to join five other CELTA grads (plus Anna's friend Nicola) on an excursion out of Hanoi. Since it's becoming apparent their names are going to keep coming up in this blog, let me introduce you to my fellow CELT-ics:

Imran used to be a math teacher in his home country, Bangladesh. He's married to a British girl who teaches at the International School here in Hanoi. They have a new baby named Hannah. Jouke (pronounced YOWka) is from Utrecht, Netherlands, where she has been teaching geography for several years. Anna, from Wales, has been teaching English in Korea for a year or two. Russell is a Filipina who has been teaching English in Ho Chi Minh City. She lives with her boyfriend Rommel, also from The Philippines. James and Brian are the two Aussies. Brian is about to wed a Vietnamese girl. Both Brian and James have been teaching English in Hanoi for some time.

The other Americans are: Donna (living in Hanoi with her husband Hank, who is a manager for Chevron), Mitchell (just arrived from Greeley, Colorado), and Sarah (just arrived from Austin, Texas). None of them have taught before.

Jouke and Anna are both staying at the World Hotel (my hotel) and have been my staunch allies and benefactors through the past four weeks.

Picking up the thread of my narrative again, last Saturday several of us hired a guide and a bus with the intention of driving to Ha Long Bay to party overnight on a boat cruising among the islands—our reward for the cruel sacrifices we've made over the past month. Learning on our way out of town that typhoon warnings had shut down all tour boats, we diverted our course to a town about 60 miles south of Hanoi—Ninh Binh (pronounced NING BING). The attraction here—two pagodas—sounded lame compared to a cruise on romantic Ha Long Bay, but Ninh Binh province proved to have considerable hidden charms.

The pagodas were photogenic and a balm to our frazzled nerves. Even better, though, was Tam Coc (Three Caves). The wide river delta in which Ha Noi sits is a flat expanse of rice fields and lotus ponds crisscrossed by dikes and causeways. Around Ninh Binh, huge limestone rocks jut incongruously out of the landscape, echoing the famous rock formations of Ha Long Bay. At Tam Coc, a slow-moving river winds among these rocks and in three places flows right through the rock. For a ridiculously modest fee we were taken up the river in small skiffs—2 or 3 passengers transported by 1 or 2 oarsmen (or oarswomen…at least one of the rowers was a woman considerably older than me)—past farmhouses, rice paddies, into the cool shade of the looming rocks, under bridges, and finally through the three dim caves with their dripping stalactites. Along the way we saw mobs of ducks, an occasional fisherman, and on the steep overgrown cliffs above us, small white mountain goats jumping from rock to rock. When the rowers arms began to tire, they rowed with their feet.

After our boatride we motored up into some actual mountains to visit Vietnam's first national park—Cuc Phuong—where we partied on a verandah, spent the night in guest rooms, visited a monkey rescue facility, explored a cave, and then inexplicably chose to climb down a precipitous mountainside of wet, razor-sharp limestone rocks in our sandals, with the nearest mountain rescue squad about a continent away. (I've really got to get away from these young people with their ironclad stomachs and their delusions of invulnerability!)